Subject of the invention is a method and an arrangement for traffic monitoring, particularly at airports.
The continuous increase of air traffic and the development of more and more complex situations at airports and their surrounding areas based on the increase of traffic lead to the necessity of implementing an efficient handling of traffic in the airport vicinity as well as on the runways and taxiways in a highly automatic way and in particular through weather-independent situation determination.
There are different types of traffic objects at airports: aircraft taking off and landing or moving on runways and taxiways and also aircraft stationary at certain points of time; furthermore there are also vehicles of various types for the conveyance of passengers or also for carrying through maintenance or transportation tasks.
The big variety of the traffic objects makes, of course, reliable localization and identification still more difficult, since many of them do not carry positioning equipment and since for reasons of costs and also complication all traffic objects are not equipped as would be required.
For the situation determination different sensor systems are known (EP 0 613 111 A1). Among them are, for instance, non-cooperative sensors such as induction loops in the runway and taxiway, photoelectric barriers or also primary radar as in the so-called Airport Surface Detection Equipment (ASDE). Such sensors can also work without a particular positioning equipment within the traffic object. ASDE can even recognize obstacles on the runway or taxiway. Certain traffic objects are also equipped with cooperative sensors, for example based secondary radar or by the readout via Automatic Dependent Surveillance (ADS) of the positioning obtained within the aircraft through satellite navigation. These sensors simultaneously allow the identification of the traffic object, yet they require the availability of installations which are still under development.
EP 0 613 111 A1 suggests an airport surveillance system and a method for the implementation of the airport surveillance by means of a system providing sensors along the runway. Those sensors register the position and speed of the moving vehicles or aircraft on the runways and taxiways. Furthermore it provides for a speech recognition unit by which the vocabulary used by the controller on the ground is recognized. As it is generally known, the controller on the ground or in the tower repeats after the pilot's first radio contact the pilot's words as regards aircraft identification, flight number and airline. The speech recognition unit analyses the words repeated by the controller in the tower. Aided by data fusion software the data of the sensors defining the position of the aircraft and the other traffic objects of the airport and the data of the speech recognition unit are put together. For the purpose of the application according to EP 0 613 111 A1 the speech recognition unit can be confined to the relatively simple embodiment, in which the in advance programmed speech of a known person, i.e. the flight controller's speech on the ground, has to be recognized.